Des Moines Register. Nov. 15, 2020
Iowa cannot realize its potential until we overcome the rural-urban divide
Editorial: Whether you live in a big city or small town, you need access to jobs, health care, affordable housing and education
There is a sickness in Iowa, and not just the coronavirus.
Call it a sickness of the spirit. It manifested itself in 2016 and now has been ratified. Voting in Iowa falls in a pattern that is unhealthy.
The parts of Iowa that are economically vibrant, are growing and appear to have a bright future voted heavily to change the occupant of the White House. People in the vast open spaces where population is declining and the future isn’t as promising carried Iowa for an incumbent president who expresses their resentments.
The pattern is not unique to Iowa, but it seems particularly stark here. Maps detailing statewide election results show a sea of red dotted with blue in urban areas.
In the presidential race, the majority of voters in 93 of Iowa’s 99 counties voted for President Donald Trump, in some counties by more than 70 percentage points. The six counties that voted for Joe Biden included Iowa’s five most populous - Polk (Des Moines), Linn (Cedar Rapids), Scott (Davenport), Johnson (Iowa City) and Black Hawk (Waterloo) - plus Story (Ames), which is the eighth-largest.
Some people will look at the election maps and see mere partisan disagreement, arguably a preference for smaller versus bigger government. After all, the map in the U.S. Senate race, which was much less personality-focused, looks similar. Those same six counties voted for Democrat Theresa Greenfield, plus Jefferson (Fairfield) and Cerro Gordo (Mason City). Republican Joni Ernst won the race with a 91-county sea of red.
And historians will say the rural-urban divide in Iowa is as old as statehood.
Much the same voting pattern showed up a decade ago in the vote that ousted three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were part of the unanimous 2009 ruling that allowed same-sex couples to marry in our state. Just nine counties voted to retain all three justices: the same six that voted for both Trump and Ernst, plus Jefferson, Muscatine (home to the city of Muscatine) and Winneshiek (Decorah).
The urban-rural divide also cleaves the Iowa Legislature, where bills championed by the Iowa Farm Bureau frequently power through to adoption, yet economic development initiatives put forward by the Iowa Chamber Alliance, representing the largest communities in Iowa, often find tougher going.
The divide was on full display in 2015, when Des Moines Water Works sued drainage districts in three rural northern Iowa counties, accusing them of funneling high levels of nitrates from farm fields into the Raccoon River, a source of drinking water for a half-million central Iowans. The lawsuit was dismissed as a policy argument best settled by the Legislature, but hard feelings linger.
The risk for Iowa is that it feels as if the state’s historical rural-urban divide is now on steroids, pushed to a new extreme by the us-versus-them polarization of today’s politics.
Arguably, rural Iowa votes in a way that wallows in resentment of urban success, and urban Iowa looks on with indifference as rural schools consolidate and small-town main streets wither.
Today, Iowans who used to be renowned for niceness prefer a national leader whose defining characteristic is meanness, especially toward urban areas, where more liberals, racial minorities and immigrants live. Many voters seem to delight in Trump not because he governs well, but because he “owns the libs.”
In Iowa, many of those libs in places like Des Moines or Davenport resent being lumped in with the much-derided “East Coast elites,” just as many rural Iowans resent the stereotype regrettably voiced by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 that bitter small-town Midwesterners “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
Enough. Giving the middle finger to the other side is not a plan.
Not for the country. And not for Iowa.
Last year, 69 of Iowa’s counties lost population, reflecting an emptying out that stretches back a century.
A house divided might continue standing, but Iowa will not reach its full potential until urban people pay more attention to the issues confronting rural Iowa, and rural people cheer urban Iowans as they work to strengthen their communities.
Though the election underscored our divide, it is time to come together. Whether a family lives in a town of 100 people or 100,000, we generally need the same things, including good jobs, good schools, affordable housing and high-quality health care. We all would benefit from immigration reform, common-sense trade policies, action to address climate change and assurance of equal treatment under the law.
The more time that lawmakers spend on these issues of common good, and less on wedge issues like abortion and gun control, the better.
Overcoming the unhealthy divide in Iowa is a project for all who care about the state. Iowa cannot reach its full potential until we collectively work harder to understand the struggles of people across Iowa and develop policies that seek to lift up all of us, regardless of where we live.
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Quad-City Times. Nov. 15, 2020
A big day in the Quad-Cities
Friday was a big day in the Quad-Cities.
For the first time, we got to drive on the new Interstate-74 bridge.
True, it was just the Iowa-bound piece. The whole bridge isn’t scheduled for completion for another year. But after three years of construction, 26 years of planning and a 2020 that’s already seemed like it’s lasted a quarter century all by itself, the Iowa-bound span’s opening to traffic Friday was a welcome shot in the arm for the Quad-Cities.
It is tangible proof that we can still do big things here, even in the face of huge challenges.
To some, the opening of the new span may just represent a more convenient way to travel across the river. For others, it was a milestone long in the making. A goal that first had to go through years of studies, surveys, presentations, public hearings, earmarks, groundbreakings, funding hurdles, property relocations, mussel relocations, delays and myriad other steps. So many steps that the goal always seemed to be on some distant horizon.
Well, the horizon is here.
Denise Bulat is one of the few who was around to take part in the early planning for the bridge, which she notes began in 1994. It was then that the seeds were planted for a 1998 report that charted a long-term future for Mississippi River crossings.
Over the years, we’ve taken steps toward achieving that vision. The tolls on the Centennial Bridge (remember those?) are gone. And on Friday, we took a major step toward achieving the focal point of that vision, improving the I-74 crossing.
Bulat, who was transportation director of the Bi-State Regional Commission back then and now is the organization’s executive director, got a chance to take a sneak peak at the bridge on Wednesday. She joined a handful of others, including members of the news media, who got an up-close look at the span; who got a chance to take a walk on what until now we’ve only been able to see from below.
It was her day off, but Bulat said, “I wasn’t going to miss this.”
What she saw was an impressive new structure, with a breadth that more than matches the bridge it will replace. (At 72-feet, the Iowa-bound span is wider than the entire existing twin bridges).
What she saw was a gleaming arch that already is a defining piece of the Quad-City skyline.
What she saw was the culmination of years of planning, vision and hard work that is being brought to fruition by a bi-state partnership and hundreds of construction workers who are building a legacy meant to last 100 years.
“It was gorgeous,” Bulat said. “I was just kind of blown away.”
We understand that. For those who have watched this process inch forward, the new bridge was only something we imagined would occur some day.
Other than Bulat, there aren’t many who were centrally involved with the I-74 project who still are in the picture today. The only other we can think of is Bettendorf City Administrator Decker Ploehn.
While saying he’s thrilled at the new opening, Ploehn told us the other day he’s waiting to celebrate when the entire structure is open for business.
We get that. To some, this project won’t even be done until the old bridge is gone. Still, for us and for many others, there was much to celebrate with Friday’s opening.
In the coming weeks, this new bridge will allow two-way traffic from Iowa and Illinois, a step that will accommodate construction of the new Illinois-bound span. As of Friday, though, it was only Iowa-bound traffic that could go on the newly opened bridge.
That wasn’t going to prove much of a hurdle for Bulat, though. An Iowa resident who works in Illinois, she said she planned to take a “long drive” around the Quad-Cities in order to be able to use the new bridge on the first day that it was open.
We imagine there are a few others who took a long drive Friday to do the same thing. We’ve waited a long time for this day.
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Fort Dodge Messenger. Nov. 14, 2020
Big turnout shows Iowans know how to vote
Participation is needed to keep our democracy strong
The 2020 general election was a blockbuster.
American voters turned out like they hadn’t in recent memory, casting a record amount of votes.
Iowa voters participated in a big way via absentee balloting or going to the polls. Secretary of State Paul Pate reported a statewide voter turnout rate of 75.73 percent.
According to Pate, there are 2,243,758 registered voters in the state. He reported that 1,699,286 of them cast ballots.
Locally, voters exercised their democratic rights in big numbers. In Webster County, voter turnout was 69 percent. In Hamilton County, it was 77 percent and county Auditor Kim Schaa called it ”the biggest response that I’ve ever seen.” In Humboldt County, voter turnout was about 80 percent.
Clearly, Iowans were motivated to vote. In the not-too-distant future, entire books will likely be written by those trying to explain this surge in voting. But the bottom line is this: people all over the country showed that they know how to vote.
That is a good thing. For more than 200 years, the United States of America has been showing the rest of the world what democracy is. Yes, sometimes, perhaps often, it is messy, but it is better than anything else ever tried. And for it to keep working, Americans have to keep voting.
We wish every election motivated voters like the most recent one just did.
Now that voters here and across the country have demonstrated that they can fill out an absentee ballot or find the voting booth, we call on them to keep on doing so.
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